What are Theories of Desire Theories of?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to clear ground so that I bring a puzzle into view. My topic, at the most general level, is human motivation. To be motivated is not simply to be moved. It is to be self-moved. What is that? My more specific topic is the role of desire in motivation. What is it to have a desire, and how does desire contribute to self-movement? Now I actually believe this question is ill posed, unless we say more about how “desire” is to be understood. But I also believe this question becomes deeply interesting, from a philosophical standpoint, when we take “desire” to refer to the motives Thomas Nagel called “unmotivated desires.” Unmotivated desires are motives that arise in us spontaneously or automatically, without our having arrived at them as conclusions of practical deliberation. They are motives that we might call “passions,” to mark the fact that we are, in this respect, passive in relation to them. The question then becomes: how is the concept of a passion even coherent? The concept of a passion combines two ideas—that of motivation, and that of passivity. But motivation is self-movement. How can we be passive with respect to our own self-movement? If my passion is my motive, then it cannot be like an ocean tide, something that simply carries me along. It must, somehow, be me moving myself. But then it looks as though I must be active in relation to it. So how is passion even possible? Call this “the paradox of passion.” The reason I need to clear ground is that the recent philosophical literature on desire makes it hard to even acknowledge this puzzle, much less solve it. Contemporary philosophers, many of whom otherwise disagree with one another about a broad range of issues, have converged on a common conception of desire that I will call, following Talbot Brewer, “the evaluative outlook conception of desire.” I will argue that the concept of “desire” at the center